A recurring question in the literature on Nazi economic policy is why the Nazis refrained from
implementing a policy of wide-scale nationalization of private firms [See Buchheim and Scherner (2005)
for a recent example]. Indeed, this question is interesting since the Nazis’ official economic program and
their electoral manifestos regularly included this pr
oposal. However, it is not a central concern of this
paper. It is worth noting that by rejecting large-scale nationalization, the Nazi government joined the
mainstream in Western capitalist countries, which were, in the 1930s, more given to intervention through
regulation and fiscal policy. As explained in Megginson (2005, p. 10), nationalization of private firms was
not a major policy in Western capitalist countries o
nce the worst of the Great Depression was over.
Ya or there's this Jewish, Austria German Economist with a phD in Law guy who actually fled the German advance in Europe during the first year of WWII:
"De facto government ownership of the means of production, as Mises termed it, was logically implied by such fundamental collectivist principles embraced by the Nazis as that the common good comes before the private good and the individual exists as a means to the ends of the State. If the individual is a means to the ends of the State, so too, of course, is his property. Just as he is owned by the State, his property is also owned by the State.
But what specifically established
de facto socialism in Nazi Germany was the introduction of price and wage controls in 1936. These were imposed in response to the inflation of the money supply carried out by the regime from the time of its coming to power in early 1933. The Nazi regime inflated the money supply as the means of financing the vast increase in government spending required by its programs of public works, subsidies, and rearmament. The price and wage controls were imposed in response to the rise in prices that began to result from the inflation.
As Mises showed, to cope with such unintended effects of its price controls, the government must either abolish the price controls or add further measures, namely, precisely the control over what is produced, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it is distributed, which I referred to earlier. The combination of price controls with this further set of controls constitutes the
de facto socialization of the economic system. For it means that the government then exercises all of the substantive powers of ownership.
This was the socialism instituted by the Nazis. And Mises calls it socialism on the German or Nazi pattern, in contrast to the more obvious socialism of the Soviets, which he calls socialism on the Russian or Bolshevik pattern."